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Object conservators Katy May and Abigail Mack complete a
re-patination treatment of Lucas Samaras’ Chair Transformation
Number 20B.
The photograph conservation department continues
its collaboration with the Gallery’s scientific research and
photographs departments and colleagues at partner institutions
on a comprehensive investigation of the technical
history, chemistry, materials characterization, connoisseurship,
preservation, and conservation of platinum and
palladium photographs. Japine: William Willis’ Proprietary
Paper was co-authored with colleagues at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and presented at the 2012 annual meeting
of the American Institute for Conservation, illuminating a
long-forgotten class of platinum prints favored by leading
photographers of the early twentieth century. A technical
investigation of waxed paper negatives began for the
upcoming exhibition Captain Linnaeus Tripe: Photographer
of India and Burma, 1854–1860.
The department completed forty-five major treatments,
168 minor treatments, and 755 examinations for exhibitions,
loans, acquisitions, and donor development. The
majority of conservation treatment was in preparation for
the exhibitions I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the
Street, 1938–2010; Modern Lab: Material Interventions;
and The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Last
One Hundred Years. Among the conservation challenges
was Ilse Bing’s Self-Portrait, a complex collage of silver
gelatin photographs, electrostatic prints, black paper, metal
wire, mirrors, and a clock in an acrylic box frame.
Object conservators completed seventeen major
treatments, ninety-one minor treatments, and 829
PRESERVING
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examinations of sculpture in preparation for acquisition,
loan, and exhibition. One of the many challenging treatments
was the stabilization and support of the weakened
original suspension strings of Alexander Calder’s
Cascading Flowers. After ten years of exhibition in the
Sculpture Garden, Lucas Samaras’ Chair Transformation
Number 20B was completely re-patinated, returning
the sculpture to the appearance intended by the artist.
Surface grime and discolored overpaint were removed and
losses were filled and inpainted on the fifteenth-century
Florentine, polychrome sculpture Saint John the Baptist.
Marc Chagall’s ten-by-seventeen-foot mosaic continued
to engage conservators as each individual panel was treated
after being de-installed from its former Georgetown
garden wall location. Additional treatments in progress
include José de Rivera’s painted aluminum sculpture
Black, Yellow, Red; three miniature wax portraits depicting
scenes from the Passion of Christ; Henri Matisse’s
Figure Decorative; and the late fifteenth-century painted
and gilded wood sculpture The Holy Kinship.
Object conservators contributed to the exhibition catalogue
and collaborated on wall texts, public lectures, and a
featured website for Antico: The Golden Age of Renaissance
Bronzes. Technical investigation of serial bronze casting
in nineteenth-century France, in particular Théodore
Gericault’s Flayed Horse I, II, and III, complemented
research of Renaissance bronzes funded by the Smith
Family Foundation.
The loans and exhibitions conservators worked on
seventeen major exhibitions, completing more than 1,682
incoming and outgoing condition reports, and constructed
twenty-six micro-climate and water-proof packages for
outgoing loans. Frame conservators completed more than
220 minor treatments and eleven major treatments.
The exhibition program posed new and interesting
challenges for the conservators. Colorful Realm: Japanese
Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800)
required extensive collaboration between the exhibition
conservator and the Gallery’s facilities maintenance
engineers to create a custom environment for the delicate
scrolls. Masterpieces of American Furniture from the
Kaufman Collection, 1700–1830; Warhol: Headlines; Joan
Miró: The Ladder of Escape; and Color, Line, and Light:
French Drawings, Watercolors, and Pastels from Delacroix
to Signac all required lengthy participation at lender
homes and partner venues.
The outgoing loan program continued to challenge conservators
to innovate. To provide a controlled environment
for the delicate recto/verso panel of Dürer’s Madonna and
Child, conservators devised a new system for creating a
micro-climate package within the frame.
Frame conservators worked on several special projects
including the re-sizing of the Dutch seventeenth-century
ripple-mold frame for Willem van de Velde’s Marine.